Rye senior possibly kidnapped from gas station three days before graduation

The man had told the waitresses that he was waiting at the gas station to open while on a trip to Wyoming.

He was seen leaving the station only minutes after entering it. He drove away pulling what was described as an “odd trailer” that appeared to be homemade, according to a Denver Post article.

It was built of plywood, about four or five feet long and was covered with a tarp, the waitresses had said.

The car was “eye-catching,” a “flashy” late-model two-door hardtop, possibly a Grand Prix Pontiac. It was silver gray or white with maroon trim and a maroon laundau top.

The waitresses hadn’t noticed whether there was anyone else in the car with the driver.

Bob and Betty Lepley drove to Cheyenne, Wyo. and left posters. They went to police stations along I-25 and spoke to police and sheriff’s deputies about their son. They also went south on I-25 to Las Cruces, N.M. and Texas, speaking with officers along the way and leaving posters, according to a Denver Post article. They also spoke with officers as far away as Juarez, Mexico.

A psychic named Dixie Veterian said the mystery man was a bisexual who hit Joe with a wrench and took the money on a spur-of-the-moment thing, according to a 1977 Denver Post article. She claimed the killer put the unconscious youth in his trailer, drove to a spot along the Republican River near Concordia, Kan., where he beat him to death and buried him.

Sheriff’s investigators searched along the river for the burial site but could not find Joe’s remains.

The sheriff’s office continued to receive false sightings in New Mexico, Oklahoma and Utah of the missing youth, but no useful tips.

In the coming years, Pueblo County deputies sent Joe’s fingerprints to South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming, West Virginia and Alabama when bodies of young men were found.

Deputies investigated numerous suspects with violent records.

The Lepley family hired a Colorado Springs private investigator named G.C. Erianne to search for their son. Nothing came of it. Reward posters were distributed in all 50 states and in Mexico and Canada.

New tips and theories continued to dribble in to the Pueblo Sheriff’s Department over the years. Investigators have tirelessly followed many of them.

A Colorado college professor who lived in the same county came under suspicion, said Jeff Lepley, Joe’s older brother.

Four days before Joe disappeared the professor’s wife vanished. The professor remarried and his second wife died under suspicious circumstances. The remains of the professor’s first wife was found four years after she and Joe had disappeared. The man committed suicide.

Betty Lepley said law enforcement officials including a group of retired FBI agents and detectives who reviewed his case in 2005 believe the professor is somehow linked to the case.

But Betty Lepley said she believes that it was someone her son caught stealing from the till.

“We don’t know,” she said.”It’s been awfully hard.”

About three years ago skeletal remains were discovered between Colorado City and Walsenberg. The Lepleys provided DNA samples, but no DNA could be extracted from the weathered bones, Betty Lepley said.

Whatever happened may remain a mystery forever.

But what tortures Joe’s mother are the factors that should have stopped it from happening in the first place. Joe went missing in broad daylight. It was a Memorial Day weekend so there were a lot of vacationers on the highway. People across the road at another gas station could have seen something as well as waitresses in the restaurant adjoining the gas station.

“This is something that absolutely should not have happened,” Betty Lepley said.

People with information that could help solve the case are asked to call the Pueblo Sheriff’s Office at 719-583-6125.

Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or Facebook.com/@kmitchellDP or Twitter.com/@kmitchellDP for updates on this cold case and others.

I was one of Joe’s classmates. He went missing the day if our Baccalaureate. We had left his chair vacant, in hopes that he would come rushing in wearing his purple gown and clutching his purple mortar board hat but sadly, that never happened. Our class pulled together, taking his picture to the various television stations; we all pulled together, searching the four corners of our state and beyond and still nothing. I remember Joe’s mom addressing our class at the commencement ceremonies, telling each if us how proud she was and how she never wanted to hear about “bad” kids in the Rye/Colorado City area. She had lost her son, but she was still able to have compassion for our class, as we too lost someone close. There were only 57 kids in our graduation class, so we were more like family. It’s been 38 years this May and I often wonder what Joe might have gone on to become. Tragedy strikes anywhere, and at any time, and for one brief moment back in May/June 1976 we were national news. I’d rather we’d have never been another news story; rather, I wish we would have been just another group of high school seniors who shared a graduation together and went on to make a difference in life. A lot of our other classmates have since passed on, but Joe was the first. He never got to take that walk for his diploma, never got married, never got to be a father or a grandfather. He did manage to bring a small community even closer together, and he bound the class of 76 together forever by his sudden departure. RIP Joe, the Thunderbolt class of 1976 will NEVER FORGET YOU!

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.